Action Shooter Archives - Page 6 of 11

Doom Therapy

April 11, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday was a bit of a frustrating day. For some reason lately there has been this common theme for me at work. That is getting pulled into projects that I have never touched before, and don’t even know the history of… as a sort of troubleshooter in chief. I apparently have this ability to break through the layers of urban legends and get at the heart of problems. Largely this all centers on my ability to ask “why are you doing it that way?”… regardless of who happens to be in the room. I am not mean spirited about it, but in truth what I am trying to do is separate out what is needed and adds value to the process and what is just extra steps that were put in for no apparent reason. I mean I have worked in environments where I did not have access to the appropriate permissions, and in those environments you sort of make things work however you can. A prime example is a process that I a digging into right now that involves going for seven hops between what is essentially an FTP drop directory and the actual directory the software loads data from. I’m trying to peel back the layers of tradition and determine does each of these steps actually do something other than just adding more steps where a file can possibly get corrupted. Also in this case the file crosses the operating system boundary at least four times which in itself is sort of problematic.

There are days when I have had my fill of madness and simply need to watch the world burn. Instead of ACTUALLY watching the world burn… I have a more healthy outlet in the form of video games. The genre of choice during these days is some form of a shooter, and last night on a whim I decided to boot up the modern incarnation of Doom. Now I have not spent nearly as much time in this game as it deserves, largely because it ran less than amazing on my previous system. I mean it was workable but for a game that demands such fast paced action… my old AMD FX-6300 process wasn’t really doing the job. Now that I have this spiffy x99 i7 system it runs extremely smooth in both normal and vulcan modes. In theory I should probably put this game on the SSD because it has quite possibly one of the slowest boot sequences that I have seen from any game. Whatever the case it absolutely filled my need especially when it comes to “glory kills”, which allows you to rip the heads/arms/various other body parts off of demons when they are low health. When you are deeply frustrated… it helps a little bit to inflict massive amounts of digital carnage.

After about an hour of “Doom Therapy” I was more than ready to strap back into the environmental suit and go exploring in Mass Effect Andromeda. Last night I arrived at “Not-Tatooine” the obligatory desert world in the Andromeda galaxy. I think there is some unwritten rule that if you have an ice wasteland planet… you must then have a desert wasteland planet to balance things out. The positive is that “Not-Tatooine” is way easier to traverse than “Not-Hoth” due to the lack of giant ice crevices that go on forever. There are however giant sinkholes that seem to go on forever, but these seem easier to see than the crevices were. One of the things that you have to know about me is… that essentially roads and paths in videos games don’t exist and I will try my damnedest to figure out how to wall hack my way into a place rather than trying to sort out which direction the game is intending me to approach. This absolutely wrecks a lot of scripting that intends on players to arrive from a specific vector… and sometimes causes some hilarious moments of me unintentionally “sneaking” up behind guards. As a result when you apply this instinct to Andromeda it means that I spend a not insignificant amount of time forcing my nomad to climb sheer rock faces by abusing boosts.

The sad moment of last night unfortunately was when I decided that I should probably abandon my N7 tier 5 gear for something tier 6… and as a result I wound up putting on a full set of initiative spearhead armor. It has some perfectly reasonable if generic stats… but the key problem is that it just doesn’t look as cool. I have yet to find a set of “new” gear that really looks cool… and have been relying on the Quarian themed armor that I got with the collectors edition and the various N7 armor sets that I have been able to scrounge up. Apparently the Initiative only got to take the ugly armors with them to Andromeda… because all of the cool armor was needed to fight the Collectors and or the Reapers. I have a massive influx of research points because quite honestly… none of the Helius cluster gear looks very cool. I’ve never touched any of the Kett weaponry largely because they are ugly as sin, and while the Angaran weapons look a little better…. they are nowhere near as cool as the good old standbys from the Milky Way. The look and feel of a weapon to me are as important as the function. In theory what I should do is hang out next to one of the forward supply points and keep swapping weapons until I have tried out everything in my inventory before returning to my practice of mass deconstructing everything. The inventory upgrades have given me some breathing room to be able to hold onto some extra items.

Dangerous Water

March 28, 2017 by Belghast

03-27-2017-18-24-05-35

I am pretty sure I am coming down with something because I have felt fairly lousy since the weekend. It is the sort of indiscriminate miserable that just makes doing anything a complete trudge. It also feels like I have spent more time searching for something to play than actually playing anything. Then things happen like the fact that for some reason I booted up Bioshock Remastered? I got the game free for owning all of the other Bioshock content, and I installed it some time ago thinking it might be nice to play back through this game. Then the election happened… and the character of Andrew Ryan felt a little too on the nose for me personally. So as a result it has sat unloved as a desktop icon… waiting on someone to give it the time of day and click on it. For whatever reason last night I did just that… and apparently the game defaults to running at 4k. Did you know that 4k PNG screenshots are almost 15 mb a piece? I didn’t but now do… I have lots of them that I will ultimately need to drop down if I ever hope to use them. Something else that I did not know is that if you have a USB Controller connected to your system… the game doesn’t seem to be willing to give you a mouse and keyboard option. So as a result I played through on the Xbox 360 controller I leave hooked up to my gaming machine. I didn’t get super far before the whim changed, but enough to remember how much I really love this game. I do find it extremely odd that you can’t really sight any of the weapons though…. that is not something I remembered but I guess it makes sense given that your alternate fire is whatever plasmid you happen to have equipped. Personally I still think the game looks gorgeous, and artistically it has some of the most memorable visual sequences and staging.

mass-effect-andromeda-03-27-2017-19-47-55-37

When I bounced I ultimately did so in the direction of Mass Effect Andromeda, and opted to finish up Hvarl. The weird part about this is that I thought I had not actually really scratched the surface of this planet. However it seems like in the grand scheme of things is is maybe half the length of Voeld. The weird part about this is it seems like the last thing that I waited to do was actually go vault hunting. I am not exactly sure if you can do this early however since the actual access to the vault and the second half of the map only work if you happen to be on specific quests. So far this seems like the most “on rails” planet given that things need to happen in a specific sequence to end up leading to the end of it. The planet itself reminds me an awful lot of Dromund Kaas from SWTOR, with a much more wild jungle area. In the grand scheme I did not like this planet nearly as much as I did Voeld… and also it doesn’t feel nearly as satisfying to move on past it either. I think the biggest part of this for me is the complete and total lack of Nomad action, which makes sense given how dense the foliage is. That said I did not really realize how much of my enjoyment planet side is related to driving my Nomad around until I hit this planet. We talked about it on twitter yesterday… but want to buy a Nomad racing DLC for this game.

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Towards the end of the night I moved forward in the story and started the world of Kadara, which happens to be populated by a bunch of the Exiles off the Nexus. Functionally you can think of it as Omega by any other name… except instead of a slew of interesting Aliens… you have a bunch of asshole humans instead. After Desert World, Ice World and Night World… I was happy to move on to something that looked relatively normal. You know other than the whole acid water thing going on… and toxic regions that damage your suit similar to the last few worlds we have been on. Something tells me that I am ultimately going to work on terraforming the shit out of this world first thing so that I can enjoy the ride more freely. I’ve barely just scratched the surface but I gotta say… fighting Nexus outlaws is way more enjoyable than any of the enemy types I have encountered to date in this game. I mean I love the Remnant and it is always fun to kill Kett, but the outlaws here feel much more varied. Especially when you factor in that apparently there is a turf war going on, and the two factions are gunning for each other as well as you. I am sort of longing for a “kill everyone and settle the planet” option but I am not likely going to see that.

Wildlands

February 6, 2017 by Belghast

grw-2017-02-04-10-19-02-05 — laptop screenshot

It’s Monday morning and I am still struggling from whatever the hell I picked up at Pax South. For a period of time last week I thought I had started to kick it… so I backed off the over the counter meds and apparently that was a massive fail. For most of last week I was working on pure adrenaline as we careened headlong towards a super important demo that we had at work for Thursday afternoon. After that happened… I largely started falling back apart and now even though I tried my best over the weekend to get back on the meds I am still struggling. I am hoping that today at some point things start to chill out because we have an even more important demo this afternoon. We are in crazy crunch mode with a big release looming on the all too near horizon, so I know that once I get back in the swing of things I won’t have time to fall apart any further. So hopefully I can survive once again on adrenaline and caffeine to get me over that finish line when I can well and truly have time to fall apart and be sick.

grw-2017-02-05-09-40-03-99 — desktop screenshot

Ghost Recon Wildlands was one of those games that I had only been tangentially following. I remember watching the video when it was announced and thinking that it looked pretty cool. However I generally don’t really go in for “military fantasy” style games like Call of Duty, where I am an operator in a tangential reality to our own. Ultimately this is the big reason why Destiny has continued to click for me… but Division fizzled out is because killing monsters will always feel better than killing people. I knew there was a beta going on this weekend because another friend had been offering invites, which I largely turned down because I thought to myself “I have too many games to play”. However next thing I know my friend Dallian emails me an invite to the beta on the PC so since I already had the key I figured that I might as well check it out. I am largely over my frustrations with UPlay because I guess while playing The Division I learned to accept it. I mean it is still a better interface than Origin… so that is at least something. Over the weekend I tried playing the game on both my i7 x99 980 gtx based gaming desktop and my i7 960m based gaming laptop. In both cases the game performed fairly well… with the laptop getting 30 fps on medium settings and the desktop getting a predictable 60 fps on high settings. I will be trying to remember to caption the source of each screenshot, since I took some from both.

grw-2017-02-04-10-31-05-74 — laptop screenshot

As far as the game itself… well to be truthful it plays a lot like most of these games do. Once you take the setting into account and the fact that you are playing a third person game instead of a first person game… I found it largely indistinguishable from Farcry. You roam the world, taking on baddies while collecting resources for your faction of choice… so that you can then unlock upgrades. The primary difference being that there seemed to be far less story… and way more open world sandbox than a Farcry game. You are encouraged to go interrogate people.. but largely that just makes new blips show up on your map of where to find resources. What I went into the game hoping I would find… is The Division but in a single player fighting the drug cartels skin. There are moments where it absolutely feels that way, especially considering that an awful lot of the sound effects when you secure something come straight from the sound effects we are used to hearing in Division. Where the game excels however is in the use of the drone mechanic, that which it largely feels like a flying camera… gives you a nice tactical advantage going into fights. If you are fast and good at spotting targets you can mark all of the hostiles in an area ahead of a fight and take them one one by one in a semi-stealth manner. I spent a lot of time sniping with my suppressed SMG, because ironically that allowed me to kill things without anyone noticing… whereas my sniper rifle drew instant attention.

The other odd thing about the game is the fact that for me personally… my squad existed for one purpose… to rez me when I got a little over zealous. There was never a fight that I went into where I felt like they were an actual benefit and made the encounter easier. They largely served as decoys to draw fire away from my position. What I did find myself missing however is the cover mechanic from The Division. There were so many places where I really needed to hug a wall and duck around a corner to get the shot… and I found that completely lacking. Maybe I simply did not find the correct keybinds to hold to cover… but whatever the case it was something I was expecting to wound up missing. The other complaint I had about the game is that it definitely feels like a console first/pc afterthought experience. Now moment to moment gameplay and firefights are awesome on the PC, and I found it nice and easy to whittle my way through incoming hostiles. Where it falls down however is that none of the vehicles felt like you could reasonably control them with a mouse and keyboard. While driving something as simple as a jeep I found myself wildly veering from ditch to ditch as I tried desperately to wild around mountainside roads. It is in fact another game about driving crappy vehicles on even crappier roads… and the shockingly even crappier keyboard and mouse controls make this an extremely frustrating experience.

I am largely placing this game in the “it might be fun” bucket, but it is definitely not a preorder sort of situation for me. The demo however really wants you to preorder, in fact it is constantly prompting you to do so. The truth is like most open world games… you spend an awful lot of time wandering through fields full of absolutely nothing. There are vast open spaces of nothing of any consequence that lay between the small bins of things that might be useful. When you start running missions, rather than roaming aimlessly like I do… you spend an awful lot of time retracing areas that you have already been to as you operate out of specific hub locations. Where the game excels however is in town-centric firefights, with the ability to duck inside of buildings and avoid guards… then pick them off at the most opportune time. There is a larger village that you encounter pretty early that is really fun, especially if you allow the Blancos to call in reinforcements. All of that said though, the game still doesn’t really feel like it gives me something unique that makes me extremely interested in its own brand of special ops fairy tale. Especially when Horizon Zero Dawn is right around the corner… and will be a much more interesting world to explore. Video games are largely about escapism for me… and the Call of Duty style game just doesn’t feel escapist enough for me to ever really get hooked.

Bel’s Fake Game Awards

January 3, 2017 by Belghast

This break has been a bit of an odd one… namely because I have completely screwed up a few times and failed to blog. Even worse… I forgot I forgot to blog. It is as though I have been in a bit of a weird time warp where I lived a bit separate from the rest of the world for awhile. So instead of being connected like I usually am… everything has just sort of flown over the top of me without ever really sinking in. I have not been logging into MMOs hardly at all… and when I did it was for a specific focused purpose rather than just hanging out there. The break has been about falling into a number of game shaped holes… including Destiny, Minecraft, Bloodborne, and most recently Tyranny. However today represents the beginning of me trying to get into the swing of things. I technically have two full days left… well not full given that its 9 am when I am finally getting around to writing this morning. However it is time for me to do my sham of an attempt at an Awards Show… that I started last year, where the categories really don’t exist and no one actually wins.

Something Is Missing

Recently in the name of better health and that whole tradition of trying to start the New Year off right… my wife and I have been spending a lot more time walking. One of the things I greatly miss that was a huge part of my life during 2016… is Pokemon Go. One of the updates essentially screwed me over and locked me out at least semi-permanently from playing the game. The Google Safety check… seems to think my phone is rooted even though it is not. My only work around is to actually root my phone and install one of the many applications that will hide root from Pokemon Go… defeating the entire purpose of their safety check. However I am reaching a point where I really want to play the game… and I might just resort to this. Essentially this game was a good chunk of my year… or at least I was obsessive about it for two months. Pokemon Go did something that no game really has… made me care about mobile as a gaming platform and as a result it should get a significant shout out.

You Can’t Go Back

For the AggroChat Game Club, we tend to pick a game for both November and December… since once you take the holidays into account… you really have a single functional month. Last year the game that spanned the two was Fallout 4, and this year Grace chose Diablo 2 as her pick. At first I was all about this because I have some seriously rose colored lenses about this game and my memory of it. I remember trying to see who could get through all of Act V in a single lunch break, and so many farming runs to see if we could get the coveted set pieces. However on replay… I have changed drastically in my tastes since this game released, and while I was on the Diablo 3 doesn’t feel right bandwagon initially… I have evolved. Diablo 2 now feels like a grindy mess of a click fest with very little carrot and a hell of a lot of stick. So I am honestly wishing I had NOT replayed the game… and could leave it sitting happily in my memory untouched. My recent experiences… are proof of that adage that sometimes you can’t go back home.

But Maybe Sometimes You Can

wow-64-2016-12-28-20-36-59-91 — World of Warcraft: Legion

Saying that however… there are apparently times when you can go home and enjoy yourself in the same ways you used to. There was a period of time when I was convinced that Warcraft would always only tangentially matter to me. That I mourned a time and a place and a specific group of people that were long going and could likely never been aligned and arranged in the same pattern again. I’ve devoted a lot of digital ink to this lament throughout the years… and then Legion comes along and proves me to be completely full of shit. I am not exactly sure what it is about this expansion but for the first time in seven years… I feel more hope for the game ahead of me… than nostalgia for the time that has long passed. I thought I was done raiding in World of Warcraft… and instead I am actively raiding three times a week… one night of progression, one night of farmed content, and an amazing karazhan team. I am super happy with the state of the guild, and the game… and how far we have come. I am amped about the prospects of starting Nighthold on time when it releases… and while I have not spent much of this break in game it still very much feels like home. While I still have issues with some of the disjointed feeling of the forced faction storyline at times in Legion… the bulk of the content is amazing and just seems to keep getting more interesting.

But Sometimes It Doesn’t Last

The other subtext of the year is how I have apparently fallen out of love with Final Fantasy XIV. We made an attempt to get the band back together and start raiding once more… and it worked amazingly for awhile. Honestly the Free Company is still an active and happy place… just with myself not really playing much of a role in it. I keep thinking that it will be fun to return… but I knew something was a miss when I started completely blowing off the holiday events that I used to love so much. Now I am significantly behind in gear and in story… and it is going to take a significant push to catch back up. This push however is just something that I have not been willing to do as of yet. I am excited about Stormblood… but nowhere near as much as I was prior to the launch of Heavensward. I guess the scale of Heavensward felt limited… with two dungeons per patch instead of three, and that alone wore on me. When you are grinding two dungeons in an expert tier… it gets super old really fast. They have since added in other content to occupy time like the deep dungeon… but it also feels extremely grindy in nature. I know at some point I will return and happily do so… but in the meantime I have simply not been forcing myself to log in and play a game I was not entirely into.

With Guns Blazing

The real winner of the year as far as my total time spent… I feel is probably Destiny. This game has gone from being something that never quite clicked…. to turning into a game that I obsessively play on an almost nightly basis. Over the break I spent a good chunk of my time playing “Not-Wipeout” and participating in the Sparrow Racing League. I managed to hit the currently light cap of 400, and instead of it diminishing my desire to play… it seems to have only spurred me on further trying to get infusion fodder to upgrade all of my favorite items. I cannot tell you how much being able to bring my favorite weapons from Year 2… into Year 3 has improved the game for me. Traditionally MMO items are just stat sticks with a look and a feel… and cosmetic systems make it so that you can look however you want therefor really negating any need to keep using older items. Destiny however… your items have a feel and a purpose and greatly effect the gameplay. I have guns that I love… that feel amazing to use… that I cannot actually quantify in words as to why. For example I love the Fabian Strategy… even though I technically have far superior legendary items that don’t eat my single exotic weapon slot. I just feel sorry for my friends who are casually interested in the game… because I go from zero to “let me show you my pokemans” in a frighteningly short amount of time.

Bad Christmas Was A Bust

TheDivision 2016-03-09 19-09-27-97 — The Division

This time last year… I was looking forward to the impending launch of The Division. I thought this game would end up being my new Destiny, and even better so because it allowed me to get the sort of gun play and looter shooter action I craved without having to resort to consoles. Unfortunately that was not the case and I never actually made it to the level cap. Going into Division I thought I would have a strong community to support me… but one by one my friends checked out quickly for a lot of reasons not directly connected to the game play. Largely they objected to the themes… and enough so that at least one of them immediately turned around and refunded the game through steam. I could have reached outside of my circle of friends and found new communities… but I was left with the awkward situation that my PS4 clan was of course playing on that platform and that I just didn’t really want to have to pester folks to play with me on the PC side. As a result I solo’d a hell of a lot… and reached a point where to progress at the speed I wanted to progress I needed some people with me. There was also the technical problem that I just don’t really like playing a third person over the shoulder shooter nearly as much as I enjoyed playing Destiny. Even more than that… the thing that was missing was the futurism of Destiny weapons. None of the guns felt any different than any other gun to me… so ALL SMGs felt the same, ALL LMGs essentially felt the same etc… they were more stat sticks than something that felt unique or individual. I still hold hope that at some point that I will be able to get back into the game and push the last bit to hit the level cap and start doing interesting content.

Awesome But Not My Deal

Overwatch 2016-06-21 23-03-33-56 — Overwatch

Sometimes there is a game that I am way more into the game world… and the lore than actually playing it. This is very much the case with Overwatch. I love the characters, and all of the storyline that is coming out surrounding the game… and while I enjoy playing the game in small bursts it just never seems to be the game I choose to play on any given night. As a result I am something ridiculous like level 6… and have only logged a few hours in total playing the game. I think much like with League of Legends… I would enjoy playing with a team of friends… but then you run into the issue of getting bored with bots… and not having the chops or desire to learn them to play against other pre-made teams. I also tend to be most happy when I am playing Torbjorn, but always end up playing Reinhardt or Mercy because I end up getting randomed into a team full of Hanzos and Genjis. I wish I had the burning desire to play this game because I love everything about its world and what it is doing with its narrative. In truth I find myself mourning the game it could have been… back when it was originally slated to be a new MMO. I would to play a Destiny like game… set in the Overwatch universe.